James Burnham, just because I can, but also because it fills a need. Over at the Breakthrough Journal domain, I’m having a polite set-to with Mark Schmitt of the Roosevelt Institute about my argument that liberalism has no limiting principle for its welfare-state inclinations. Mark disagrees, but I think gets caught in the weeds of some of my examples.
So let’s try this again from a different angle, with an observation on liberal philosophy from Suicide of the West:
Modern liberalism, contrary to the traditional doctrine, holds that there is nothing intrinsic to the nature of man that makes it impossible for human society to achieve the goals of peace, freedom, justice, and well-being that liberalism assumes to be desirable and to define “the good society.” Liberalism rejects the essentially tragic view of man’s fate found in nearly all pre-Renaissance thought and literature, Christian and non-Christian alike.
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